The brain cannot multitask. Multitasking, when it comes to paying attention, is a myth. The brain naturally focuses on concepts sequentially, one at a time…To put it bluntly, research shows that we can’t multitask. We are biologically incapable of processing information-rich inputs simultaneously…Studies show that a person who is interrupted takes 50 percent longer to accomplish a task. Not only that, he or she makes up to 50 percent more errors.

A factory worker at an assembly line, who can learn their job in 5 minutes, can get bored fairly easily, and disengage completely.

Years of research show us that the less control a person feels over an aversive stimuli coming at them, the more likely they are to disengage. Complete loss of control over a sustained period of time can actually lead to depression. It then follows that giving the person a level of control over the situation reduce the stress - and perhaps restore the disengagement.

Whether at work, home or school, everybody carries their brain around them, and if the organ suffers from a disorder, we carry the disorder around with us too.

Even though we don't know squat about how the brain works, the little we do know suggests that if you wanted to design a learning environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was naturally good at doing, you would design the education system we currently have, not only in America, but all over the world!

The problem in today’s economy is that people are typically starting a family at the very time they are also supposed to be doing their best work. They are trying to be productive at some of the most stressful times of their lives. What if companies took this unhappy collision of life events seriously? They could offer Gottman’s intervention as a benefit for every newly married, or newly pregnant, employee.

The ability to double our biomass - not by waiting several million years and growing to be the size of an elephant - but waiting a few hundred thousand years for neurons to sprout into our brains - ones capable of having us create emotional relationships with other members of our species. We thereby double our biomass not by getting bigger, but by creating an ally.